Effective Ways To Reduce Churn - Issue #77

I once asked an audience of data and marketing specialist from different industries: how many of you have a churn model? Almost all of them raised their hand. Now, I asked, how many of you are making more than a million euros with this every year? Chuckles. No hands in the air.

The problem is that when you know who is likely to churn, you can get a higer churn rate when acting upon it. It is liking waking them up. Newsday seems to have cracked that code. They reduced churn by 58%in a certain group by using persuasion modelling, which identifies groups of target customers with high or declining engagement who may be re-engaged with gifts or incentives. They avoid disturbing what they call ´self-selectors´. These people like to make decision on their own and retention efforts could have an adverse effect.

On the advertising side churn is not a stranger either. Apparently publishers’ branded-content campaigns have painfully low renewal rates. They like to try it as an experiment but do not repeat. One way Quartz has managed to buck that trend is by giving technology insights and research to agencies and brands.

Networks tend to first standardise and then monopolyse. The same is true for the digital realm. According to Nick Srnicek there is an answer to the power Google and Facebook amass. And it lies in the past.

“Natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power. If we don’t take over today’s platform monopolies, we risk letting them own and control the basic infrastructure of 21st-century society.”